BCE-CTV deal likely to get OK by Susan Pigg

by Susan Pigg

Canada's broadcast regulator is expected to flick the switch today on a bright new television-watching future by approving telecommunications giant BCE Inc.'s $2.3 billion purchase of the CTV television network.

But a $230 million question remains: How many strings will the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission attach to the biggest broadcasting deal in Canadian history?

"I think it's going to be very hard for the CRTC not to approve this," says Michael Nolan, a journalism professor at the University of Western Ontario in London who is writing a book on Canada's biggest private television network. "It gives CTV tremendous resources and, for the first time in its history, a new lease on life.

"The greatest thing is, the deal will lead to onscreen benefits. With that kind of money, news, sports and entertainment programming has got to improve."

But the deal is likely to come at a price for CTV. Some industry experts think the CRTC will make the deal conditional on CTV selling some of the 11 specialty channels it owns, perhaps even "jewels" like TSN and the Discovery Channel.

As a requirement of the deal, the new merged company – expected to be called BCE Media – has pledged to spend $230 million on a host of new initiatives, from adding five new foreign bureaus to injecting $53 million into news and information programming.

All that and more, BCE and CTV have vowed, will boost Canadian prime-time programming from about eight hours a week to nine over the next five to seven years.

"If every Canadian – and CTV is accessible to almost all English-speaking households – gets another hour a week of Canadian programming and therefore an hour less of American programming on CTV in prime time, that's a benefit to the broadcasting system. That is a pretty big plus," says Ian Morrison, a spokesperson for the lobby group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.

But the CRTC has to "make damn sure that the things that are promised are in stone so they can't come back in two years and say, `Sorry, we're short of money.' "

Observers, many of whom sat through the almost two-day hearing at the CRTC's Hull headquarters last September, said the deal left the CRTC performing a treacherous balancing act.

Just days before the CRTC hearing was to begin, BCE chief executive Jean Monty announced a deal to buy The Globe and Mail newspaper which, with CTV, would provide much needed content for BCE's Sympatico Internet service.

While the newspaper purchase is outside the CRTC's mandate, inevitably the commission was left balancing concerns about media concentration against the recognition that Canada needs major companies on solid footing to compete in the new, global world of convergence.

"You didn't hear a lot of talk publicly about media concentration at the hearings," said an industry expert who sat through the hearing. "It's as if people realize that Canada is going to need a few integrated companies that have the scale and the scope to compete internationally."

While there were about 3,000 submissions, most in writing, to the CRTC, just a handful were opposed to the deal.

© The Toronto Star